Hello All,
I’m a Newless Cluebee (i only just got that joke),
and was wondering how the bytes should be managed,
by this i mean how much space i should put into gameplay,
how much into drawing, etc.
btw 4k is tiny, thats the size of 2 folders on windows (on my pen drive at least)
Thanks to all that can help
I put nearly 3K into graphics for Poker4K… it just depends on the game, there are no rules of best strategies here.
Don’t plan it that way. Just make the game. Think up something simple or use an old simple arcade game and just do it. Keep the feature set small and code away. After you get something that you can put up on the screen, start using all the external tricks to compress the jar file. See how close you are getting. By external tricks I mean otther zip tools, obfuscators, etc. This will then give you an idea how much room you have left to make your game.
If you are close to finished and the file is too big, just finish first. Then go over your code afterwards to see if there are any internal tricks you can employ.
I would also recommend using ANT or something to automate your build to make it easy to check your end size any time you want.
Thanks to you both, and anyone that posts after this.
how much space i should put into gameplay,how much into drawing, etc.
As few bytes as possible.
Start with some idea. Then cut it down to the absolute minimum… by that I mean… throw everything out which isnt part of the core game mechanic.
Try to put it into 4k. If there is some free room use it for things like extending the gameplay, better graphics or whatever seems to be important from your pov.
You could also do it the other way around… like making some game and then trying to get that down to 4k, by throwing things out. However, it will take way more time and you end up writing too much useless code.
As the experienced pupils above said planning on the size of each part would probably be harder to do. The way I did it was first to get the basic game structure going while keeping my uncompressed class file size <4k. After that I crammed in as many levels as possible and a couple of features while keeping track of my compressed final size of the jar-file.
The best tip I have (which also was given to me): Try out KZip, I definitely underestimated how much better compression it could give me compared to 7Zip for instance. My size before compression is >10kb (I experienced very good compression rate though due to my level data format). If you want to you can check out what I wrote about my creation on my blog: http://thisistheurl.com/2005/12/13/sokoban4k/
Good luck!